The speed with which the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were
identified was a remarkable sign that we’re in the age of ubiquitous
photos and video of the public square, albeit at a major international
event.

Between Monday and Thursday night, authorities (granted, thousands of
resources) were able to put together a pictorial and video timeline of
what happened along Boylston Street at the Boston Marathon finish line.
Once the suspects were ID’d, it was fairly easy to match those pictures
with the security camera of a 7-11 that was robbed in Cambridge last
night and for every amateur sleuth on the internet to build a composite
picture of the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Social media as the source for news

How
did we hear about the bombing in the first place? On Twitter, of
course, where friends of friends of friends were ‘reporting’ and sending
photos seconds after the bombing occurred. Boston-based Facebook
friends were a better source of news than CNN, which many not be saying
much.

Even this morning, we were seeing Facebook posts from friends in
Watertown, Massachusetts who were witnesses to the shootout that took
place last night and the manhunt that is still going on in their city.

I think back to the last time a manhunt played out across the public
consciousness, and it was the OJ Simpson slow-speed chase across Los
Angeles. We received the most timely information from the police and
media and had to decide the accuracy for ourselves.

Today, we follow the Boston Manhunt not through the media, which
struggles to keep up, or from the police with their periodic press
conferences and wild rumors, but from Twitter and Facebook, where we
know the source of the information or at least the reliability of the
social network.

This gives us pause when we consider the privacy ‘scorecard’ when it
comes to video big data, social media and the future of safety and
security in society. The question that is left open is how to have the
benefits of constant public surveillance (private or public as this case
shows) and the ability to correlate images and information at amazing
speeds. We want the benefits and we’d like to avoid the things that
embarrass us personally.